Yes - we are still alive! What a crazy few weeks..

Hi blog land!

Apologies for the delay in updating - the last few weeks have been ridiculously busy and we literally have not had a spare minute to log onto a PC.

With any endeavour of this magnitude, there are bound to be delays, but the few glitches in our plans so far seem to be uncommonly large and time consuming to overcome.  So as not to bore you with the minute details of our past few weeks, here is a not so brief summary of our first world issues :)

More specifics around some items will be in a forthcoming post to be called one of the following:

a)  "Gee, I wish I'd known that 3 months ago..."  or
b)  "Gee, that expert certainly got this very wrong..." or possibly
c)  "Jenny, do we actually have any money left for food?"


Pesky delay number one - can we please have our car and caravan back?

Despite purchasing our van in Feb 2015 and our car in August 2015, delays with the manufacturing and deliveries of both meant that we did not take possession of the car until mid Nov and the van until late Nov.  To say this is not ideal would be an understatement, as it means that we had very little time to have any modifications done and to make sure everything worked as it should.  We had a bunch of upgrades done to the car to help with the long haul towing of a big van and those all meant time for the car at the mechanics.  We still don't have a bullbar because the model we have (Ford Ranger Wildtrak PX2) is so new that no-one manufactures one that will work with the front sensors.   No bullbar means no driving lights or UHF system yet as they both need to be mounted on the bar.  (We will list all the stuff on the car and van in a later entry though much of it will get a mention in pesky delay number 3).  We don't want to head across the Nullarbor without a bullbar so hopefully it is not too much longer until one hits the market.

As for the van,  it needed some specialty work done so we could carry the bikes.  Despite asking for bike racks when we ordered it, there wasn't one on there when we picked it up and the sales guy said he was getting something custom built to sit on the back chassis bar of the van.  He had one of those metal three bike holders that usually sit on the towbar of your car and said he needed to get a metal extension rack built so it sat far enough off the back to clear the spare wheel, generator box and back wall of the van.

A week later we did our caravan towing course and all three instructors said that having a bike rack on the back of a van like that was a truly terrible idea as the vibrations and harmonics can cause micro cracks in the chassis and damage the bikes as well.  Apparently the bikes also get filthy and often fall off.  A quick Google search validated this advice.  It seems that most of the internet is aware of this issue.  We are still irked that our caravan supplier was (and still is) insistent that it would not cause an issue ('It's laughable' were his exact words).  Anyway, we spoke to the awesome guys at Harding Swift caravan services in Kilsyth and they custom built us a rack on the front tool boxes of the van.  So far, they are great.  But all that negotiating back and forth between us, them and the manufacturer occurred right before Xmas so in order for them to get the work done, we had to drop the van to them on Dec 22nd and not pick it up until they re-opened on Jan 9th (which was our original original departure date).  The van then needed to go back to the dealer for a couple of other minor repairs.

So it was then Jan 9th and we finally had a caravan ready to be loaded, and 80% of our car stuff done.  We moved our departure date to Jan 20th.  

Pesky delay number 2 - moving out of our house

The first entry in 'Gee, I wish I'd known that 3 months ago.." would be that trying to pack up your house, move into a caravan and find tenants simultaneously is a VERY STUPID IDEA!  Having to tidy the house up twice a week for inspections nearly drove us mad, although when we finally got tenants signed up in early January we were very happy that they wanted us to leave lots of the big stuff like the fridge, washing machine, couch, recliner and bed frame.

We were running fairly to schedule with the packing and moving but were delayed a little by Jenny's previously blogged neck injury.  We had a garage sale, donated what we didn't sell and started packing the rest.  But then we discovered that by golly, we have a lot of crap.  Far more crap than we anticipated.  In fact, if crap were shoes, we were Imelda Marcos (ask Google, young folk).  Our gross underestimation ended up being a big problem.

It was Sunday, and we had moved to Jenny's Mum's for a few days while we were still packing.  Cleaners were coming on the following Tuesday at 2pm, a real estate inspection was scheduled for Wed, with tenants moving in on the Thursday.  We packed and we packed. We took a seemingly endless number of boxes to the kindly offered storage space of Jenny's Aunt and Uncle and my Mum.  And still there was crap.  We had three piles - one of things for the trip, one of things to store and one of things to take to the tip.

And still we packed. Who knew our house was a Tardis?  On the Monday morning we received an email from the real estate agent telling us that the tenants didn't actually want the couch and recliner after all.  This totally threw out our planning as we suddenly needed to make 2 extra trips and then try to find room in storage (or Jenny's Mum's lounge room as it turned out) . We were up til 4.30am that night and are still deeply apologetic to my Mum for waking her up at 3.30am as we lugged boxes up the driveway, and also to Ros for forgetting the front door key and calling her on the mobile come and let us in the house at 4.15am.  Worst. Children. Ever.

On Tuesday we were back at the house early, still packing.  Ros and Charles came to help.  By lunchtime, panic started to set in as we realised that there was no way we were going to get everything out by the time the cleaners arrived.  What did we do?  We just started taking everything outside onto the the lawn, packed or not.  It looked like a giant bric a brac store had exploded and showered all of its eclectic wares into our yard.  The 'take on the trip' boxes were mixed up with the 'take to storage' boxes and the 'take to the tip' bags.  It was not pretty. 

It started getting late and we then realised that there was no way we were going to get all our stuff off the lawn, packed in boxes and to their final storage location (45 min away) by the following morning.  In between wondering how things had managed to go quite so pear shaped, we came up with the bright idea of hiring a storage unit close by and just shoving everything in there so we could sort it in daylight and without a looming deadline.  Our lovely friends Fiona and Andrew offered us a nearby place to stay that night and two super duper super heroes, Tony and Leigh came with their cars and helped us load, ferry and unload everything to the unit. Jenny hopes that Leigh will eventually forgive her for not warning him that our temporary storage unit at "Moor Room" was on the second floor and meant double-handling everything through a cargo lift. But, phew! The house was empty.


In the rush, everything had just been shoved in randomly so we spent the next week sorting it all out again and taking what we needed to the van, which we were now living in down in Mornington or to storage (the free sort!) or to the tip (Lesson learned: Jenny was horrified to find that Bayside tip cost us $106 for a trailer load - no wonder people just dump it on the roadside).

Storage Unit - badly, madly packed...

 


Storage Unit - finally sorted and empty!

The good news is that we have now left Mornington and officially 'hit the road'.  Our future posts will be far more regular and hopefully more adventure filled!